David Pierce

Movies directed by YouTubers are suddenly blowing up at the box office. Backrooms and Obsession are both smash hits, and The Amazing Digital Circus had a big debut last week. Is this the moment YouTube truly takes over Hollywood? Julia Alexander, media correspondent at Puck, walks us through the much longer history of YouTube on the big screen, and helps us figure out where this all goes next. Is the future just really, really big YouTube videos?

Now that we’ve had a couple of days to digest all the Siri AI updates, the new corner radii, and everything else Apple announced at its developer conference, we spend the episode answering all your most burning questions. What non-AI stuff are we excited about? How much catching up did Siri really do this week? And wait: what about the HomePod?

Long before Steve Jobs was the unstoppable force of nature atop Apple, shipping hit product after hit product, he was practically run out of the company after a series of bad product and management decisions. But as Geoffrey Cain argues in his new book, Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary, the 12 years Jobs spent outside of Apple turned him into the leader the world came to know. Cain joins the show to talk about Jobs’ experiences at NeXT and Pixar, how Jobs learned to be a successful leader, and the true power — and danger — of the reality distortion field.

Well that was a strange keynote! While Nilay, Vee, and Allison go run around Apple Park trying to learn more about the future of Siri, Hayden Field and Jake Kastrenakes are joining me in a half-hour-ish to break down this year’s WWDC. Come hang!

Microsoft’s commitment to AI is not news. Copilot has been everywhere for... a while now. But at this week’s Build developer conference, the company made clear that it wants — and needs — to be a bigger player in the space. The Verge’s Tom Warren joins David to talk about the new Scout AI assistant, the Solara operating system concept, and whether Microsoft can hang with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Also: how’s the new era of Xbox going?

How far can we push the limits of the human body? At the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas, a few dozen athletes tried to find out, and The Verge’s Victoria Song was there to watch. She tells us the story of the swimmers, weightlifters, and other athletes who competed, the intense training and drug regimens they underwent, and the complicated mix of pseudo-science and actual science behind the event. Then, she tells us where this project goes from here — because the Enhanced Games experiment is just beginning.

Gozde Oznur, the product manager behind the new app, told me the idea is to use Dreambeans as a place to experiment with using AI to combine all the data Google has about you into proactive, helpful “stories.” I’ve had the app for a couple of days, and outside of a lot of shopping recommendations, some of the stuff is cool! It told me to get my devices ready for WWDC, and had some helpful info for a train trip. But I cannot get used to these AI-generated pictures of me. Just can’t do it.